Plant or pet?

Closeup of the salmon-pink bloom of the red yucca


Pondering a few changes in the garden has reminded me of something D always says when I'm trying to decide whether I've reached the point of no return with one plant or another: "Well, it's not as if it's a pet." Sometimes I find it easy to agree with him and out that plant goes, sometimes dug up and moved elsewhere, sometimes passed on to a friend, sometimes into the yard waste bag (yes, I know. I should be composting).

But, as in so many other parts of my life, I rarely come to a quick decision. Usually I waver, considering all the possibilities. Sometimes I consider for so long that the plant finally dies and the decision is made for me.

Occasionally though the plant takes matters into its own hands (leaves?) and renders the decision even more difficult. A plea for survival? Who knows.

Last year I lost patience with the one remaining clump of red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) in the long upstairs bed. For the second year in a row it didn't send up even one bloom stalk. And it is an incubator for hackberries and Turk's cap. The seedlings spring up amidst the yucca fronds and are impossible to eradicate.

When I originally planted the L-shaped bed in 1995 I put in three clumps of the yucca (two one-gallon plants in each clump, I think). The idea was that the salmon-pink bloom stalks were attractive in their own right, and also that the rigid but arching stalks of the plant itself would add structure and give some winter interest to a garden made up mostly of plants that froze to the ground.

All well and good for a number of years. The clumps got larger and bloomed profusely. At some point, for reasons lost to memory, we dug up two of the three clumps. The remaining clump is in the long arm of the bed, between the Old Blush rose and the Climbing Pinkie on the steel tepee. The clump is about three feet deep and five feet wide, a substantial amount of real estate in my relatively small garden.

This spring I had every intention of pulling out the entire clump and replacing it with something new. I hadn't figured out exactly what that something new would be so I delayed removing the yucca. And then one day I noticed the reddish tips of several bloom stalks. And then more and more. All told the plant has sent up twelve stalks. The most ever, I think, and for no clear reason. I didn't fertilize it at all or water substantially more. We have gotten a fair amount of rain this spring and the pruning of the wisteria off the utility pole increased the amount of sun in that area of the garden.



So now I'm deeply conflicted. On the one hand, the yucca blooms are lovely, both up close with their yellow interiors and in a mass. And they are a hummingbird magnet. On the other hand the plant takes up a lot of space. And the salmony color of the blooms doesn't really mix well with others, particularly not the pink roses on either side. But the upright leaning stalks are an interesting companion to the wands of orange bulbine planted underneath (purely by chance; I'm sure I didn't give this a thought when I did the planting).

I think my real problem is an inability to get rid of anything that's blooming. I love flowers (although I have become more interested in foliage over the years) so a plant that's supposed to bloom but doesn't is an easy mark for me. But show me some flowers and I'm much less decisive.

What do you think? Should it stay or should it go? Or should I just procrastinate a bit longer?

Clean-up, continued

I've spent several more hours hacking through various portions of the upstairs bed. I've got everything cleared and then some.

First, can I just mention my lack of enthusiasm for Turk's cap. I actually love the little swirled flowers but, in my garden at least, Turk's cap runs rampant. When I'm at the garden store and see Turk's cap for sale I find myself rolling my eyes. When I moved into this house I was mildly excited to find the various outcroppings of the plant. Now, 13 years later, I'm considering Round Up. I've cut it back, tried to dig it up. Nothing works. It spreads, it doubles in size every year. It dies to the ground and comes back at twice the size. The flowers look good for a while and then the leaves go all crinkly and half dead and it quits blooming and all I'm left with are straggly, six foot tall stalks that lean every which a way. Okay, I'll stop babbling.


Today I chopped — and chopped and choppped — down the eight or so major clumps of Turk's cap in the upstairs yard. And found even more spots where it's doing its best to spring up. And then just for good measure I chopped down most of the misbegotten yucca from the corner of the long bed. I left a couple of pups in the far back but I opened up some serious space for something new. In the picture you can see the two trunks of yucca that I sawed off (as well as piles of various other debris waiting to be bundled up).

The space is backed by the wisteria (which is on the arbor in the downstairs yard but which tries its best to creep into the upstairs bed) so whatever I put in there needs to be able to fight that off or cohabitate politely. I have a Pride of Barbados volunteer seedling in the front yard that I may try to move. And then there's the question of the monster hamelia just to the right of the new bare spot (well, in three months it will be a monster; right now it's a few bare sticks poking up out of the ground).

On a happier — or at least less agressive note:


Here's the manfreda "Macho Mocha" that I bought late last summer. It's grown enormously and has now taken on its characteristic spotted coloration. And it's got at least three pups growing under the bottom fronds. The pot stayed out during the cold weather; we might have been able to move it but I decided to take the chance. I covered it during the ice storm and on a couple of other cold nights but the cold didn't seem to bother it at all. I'll give it a bit longer and then I'll try to remove the pups and repot them.

Treasure hunt

Gradually I've been whipping the upstairs garden into some sort of shape. I've gotten all of the perennials that died or nearly died to the ground cut back (although a mountain of debris now clutters the yard, waiting to be tied into bundles by my able assistant).

Today I cut back the Pride of Barbados in the far back, along with the tecoma stans and the red hamelia, all big woody plants, some stalks probably nine or ten feet tall. When I started on the tecoma stans I was worried that it was completely dead but a bit more hacking revealed the smallest sprigs of bright green down at ground level. The same job revealed the vine — why can I not remember what kind it is; not crossvine, not coral honeysuckle; oh well, it'll come to me — that I planted several years ago, hoping it would cover the back fence and climb up the utility pole. It's never done that but last summer it did have a few flowers — trumpet vine, that's it, Madame Galena, I belive is the variety — and although it mostly looks dead as a doornail I spied one sprig of new growth today.

The Pride of Barbados shows no signs of new growth. I'm a bit worried about it but the hamelia I'm sure will be back, despite its current pathetic look.

Also revealed in the far back are numerous pups of the agave that last fall I identified as agave lopantha. It's the plant that outgrew its spot in a big pot in the front yard a few years ago. I've already got several of its pups in other places. I think I'm going to have to find homes — homes beyond my yard — for these new ones.

I also found sprouts on a yellow brugmansia I have in a pot in the downstairs yard but the salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" in a big pot that was already resprouting before the last freeze isn't looking so good.

I'm feeling better about the garden than I was a week or so ago although there's still much to be done. I'm pondering removing the yucca that has long anchored the corner of the long L-shaped bed in the upstairs yard. It's the sole plant remaining from the barren wasteland that was the yard when we bought this house nearly 13 years ago. But I think it has to go. I may have said before that we actually tried to get rid of it a few years ago when it started looking particularly raggedy but it sprang back from a stump. If it was gone, I'd probably also get rid of the orange hamelia beside it. I much prefer the red version, both for the color of the flowers (or are those bracts?) and for the reddish hue of the foliage. That would leave a huge gap, ripe for something new.

Oh and the wisteria (on the miserable arbor) has shot out buds virtually overnight (just like all the elm trees in the neighborhood; one day to the next and suddenly tiny leaves cover every branch). I'll take pictures when it blooms in a week or so. Ugly arbor or not, it's usually quite a sight.

Spring cleaning (or kvetching)

I'm in my usual pre-spring garden funk or at least state of garden indecision. I realized a few years ago that, about this time, before plants resprout, when bare stems are the only thing showing above ground, I start to wonder if the garden is worth the trouble. I look around and all I can see are the problems and none — or at least not many — of the rewards.

Last weekend I finally got out and started cutting back the plants that froze to the ground during the several unusually cold spells we've had this winter (the lowest we've seen here was about 22, I think): the salvia "Anthony Parker" in the downstairs bed, the big salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" in a pot, several clumps of salvia leucantha, the zexmenia at the top of the stairs. Also the two big clumps of Mexican flame vine that hang down over the wall. Those vines have survived for years, in fact one of the two clumps sprang up where a long tendril of the original plant reached across the bed and rooted. I've been amazed by their hardiness over the years (I planted the original assuming it would die the first winter). This year may be the end though. I see no evidence of green, even right down at the ground. I'll wait a bit longer before I pull them up but I'm not optimistic. Still to be cut back are the tecoma stans, the hamelia and the Pride of Barbados in the far back. Also throughout the long upstairs bed are masses of purple heart in their slumped and slimy post-freeze state. And various salvia greggiis needing severe haircuts before they start setting blooms.

With some of the dead wood out of the way I can see things I'd like to change: remove the big yucca at the corner of the L-shaped bed and the orange hamelia beside it. Replace both with a new red hamelia set further back into the corner. I think the hamelia could hold its own with the wisteria that tries to creep in every year. Then, once the original hamelia is gone, I could move the salvia leucantha over to give the Maggie rose more space.

We had some of the scrubby trees along the north edge (and on the other side of the fence) of the upstairs yard removed when the tree people were here dealing with the branches downed by the ice storm. They took out a hackberry that was growing up into the wisteria and an insidious mulberry that will resprout in a minute — okay a few months — if I give it any slack. I'm thinking Round-up on the stump. Or boiling oil. Also removed was some kind of overgrown nandina-ish thing that was only served as mooring for errant lashings of wisteria creeping along the ground, looking for a way upward. The tree guys also cleared the wisteria off the power pole and, most satisfyingly, removed the four Trees of Heaven growing up between our house and the duplex next door. The trees were on the duplex's property and the owner had refused for years to remove them, even though they were clearly a menace to her property. We finally said we'll pay for it ourselves and then she said, oh, I'll be glad to pay half.

So the upstairs yard is looking a bit clearer but the downstairs yard is disaster. All of the grass, except for various odd straggles of Bermuda, is dead, the arbor is rotten and collapsing and the whole area has become a repository of cracked pots, old ice chests, and various other detritus. Depressing doesn't begin to describe it. In my brighter moments I envision a sort of terrace of large stones set in gravel, surrounded by plants rather than bare dirt, shaded by a new wisteria-covered arbor, with perhaps a fountain at the center. Then I look at what's actually there and start hacking at the mutant eupatorium of unknown variety that has sprawled randomly and unattractively out of its assigned spot. Or stoop to ponder the once lovely agave montana, now apparently dying a slow and undignified death. Can it be saved? should it be moved? taken out of its pot? put where?

Then there are the roses. To prune or not? And when? And how much? But that's another post.

Finally, some progress (I hope)

Last Sunday I finally decided to take some action in the garden. I puttered around for a bit, trimming here, pulling a weed here, before I got up the nerve to chop down the overstayed-its-welcome hypericum/St. John's Wort that was blocking my view (and air and sun) of the "Maggie" rose that I planted a year and a half ago or so.

I planted the hypericum in March 2003 at the base of an orange Tecoma stans (we always called it the orange bells). I was looking for something that would look good in the spring when the orange bells was just sticks waiting to sprout (the lightest freeze killed it down to the ground). Whatever I planted needed to be able to survive being smothered by the orange bells when it reached its full height and spread (about 10 feet by 8 feet) later in the summer. Someone at Barton Springs Nursery suggested the hypericum, supposedly a dwarf variety, or daylilies. I've never been a daylily kind of person so I went for the shrub.

For the first few years it didn't do much but by 2005 it had grown larger than I expected, maybe four feet tall and wide and had bloomed a bit. I loved the buds, tiny balls that opened into clear yellow flowers. Unfortunately there weren't many flowers and the plant suffered in July and August. It didn't die but it didn't look great either. That wasn't so bad when it was covered with the sprawling orange bells but . . .

In April 2005 I decided the orange bells had to go. Unlike its yellow sibling (or parent?) it didn't bloom profusely, most years not flowering until late July or August, sometimes even later. And, although the individual flowers were beautiful there just weren't enough of them. And the plant itself was so ungainly and huge. It blocked my view of the upstairs garden from the kitchen window and smothered everything around it.

After a trip to the Rose Emporium with a friend where we sniffed every rose that was blooming, I had my eye on a rose called "Maggie" that was beautiful and smelled wonderful. I came home and told my husband I'd decided to take the orange bells out and put in the rose and some other stuff.

Hah! We (mostly he) spent a week of evenings digging and hacking roots (some 4 or 5 inches across) and shoving the root ball back and forth trying to loosen it up. We talked about hiring someone with a stronger back and better tools but in the end we got it out of there. I dug in a bunch of compost and then went crazy planting what looked like an enormous space.

I checked my garden notebook on Sunday and saw that I planted the rose, a Mexican bush sage (one with solid purple blooms) that I'd had in a pot for a year or so while I tried to find a spot for it, a magenta salvia greggii, some purple and fuschia verbenas and some 4-inch cleome transplants. All in an area about 10 feet by 4 feet that was already home to the hypericum and a small agave as well as a zexmenia. And bordered by a hamelia patens (fire bush) that in April was also nothing but sticks and two clumps of freeze-pruned Mexican flame vine that always go out of control by mid-summer.

Even at the time I wondered if I was putting too much into the space and noted that I always underestimate the summer size of the hamelia. But, I wrote, the cleomes were annuals and the verbena would be easy to move. It's bound to be better than the orange bells, I wrote.

And that first year it was. The hamelia indeed got bigger than I remembered and it and the Mexican bush sage mingled together but that worked okay. The salvia bloomed and even the hypericum had a few more flowers than I remembered from the year before. The few blooms I got out of Maggie that first year were as beautiful as I hoped. The cleomes and verbena filled in the blank spaces while the other plants were growing. It was all a bit out of control but I generally like that kind of look.

But the changes we made to the house and the surrounding hardscape this spring changed my perspective, literally. That area of the garden is now viewed not only from my kitchen but also from the new sitting room. And the hypericum was at the most prominent point, right at the top of the reconfigured stairs coming up from the screened porch and the downstairs yard.

By August the bush sage had overwhelmed the rose, abetted by the rampant, twining growth of the flame vine. The hypericum and zexmenia (and the vine) had spurred each other on to ever greater heights, all intertwined and, in the case of the hypericum, browned by the summer heat. I kept pruning things back to try to give the rose some room but, in the end, something had to go.



Here's a (bad) picture of what it looked like before. You can see what a mess the whole area was and how it relates to the new porch.

So on Sunday I chopped the hypericum down. I still need to dig up the stump (I suspect it's one of those plants that will shoot back up, even from leafless, bare sticks) and, even though it looks a bit barren right now, I think in the long run it will be an improvement. I just have to resist the urge to fill up the space with whatever plants I have languishing in pots or some bargain I can't resist at the garden store.

My question now is whether to try to dig up the rose and move it over a foot or so, giving it some more breathing room from the bush sage. I've never tried to transplant a rose. I'm thinking maybe Maggie will sort of grow sideways to fill up the new vacant space, kind of like the bush sage does to stay out of the way of the hamelia.

I'm also thinking about digging up the agave (it suffered from years of being covered all summer by the orange bells; twice the crown of new stalks either rotted off or were eaten by something). I'll replace the agave with another slightly larger, more attractive agave I have in a pot. The magenta salvia has grown out over the edge of wall, pushed out of shape by the hypericum, but stilll blooming. I'll leave it and the flame vine even though the vine sends out tendrils that ensnare everything. But those orange flowers are hard to beat, especially spilling down over the wall.

Still pondering

I haven't been doing any gardening, beyond watering and trying to contain some plants that have gone out of control. The salvia leucantha, blooming beautifully, has overrun the Maggie rose, which is threatened from its other side by the disappointing hypericum (St. John's Wort, supposedly a dwarf variety that's at least four feet tall and has never done much but sprawl and turn brown in the summer if it isn't watered; I've only gotten a few measly flowers every spring — but such cool flowers; I love the way the buds start as little balls before they open). Cool flowers or not, I think it's history as soon as the zexmenia that has grown up through it stops blooming and I can chop the hypericum down without losing a bunch of flowers. Then I may need to move the rose, although if I move it much it won't get enough sun (and I've never tried to move a rose; possible or no?). Then there's the Mexican flame vine in the same area that has responded to water and cooler weather with rampant growth (and even some blooms on the section that gets more sun).



I love the flame vine's buds, opening like little claws, and I like the way the vine looks trailing down the wall but — kudzu-like — it overtakes anything in its path.




Then there's the whole downstairs yard, something of a disaster area at present. The arbor needs to be replaced (without destroying the overgrown wisteria) and something needs to be done to give the whole area some sense of purpose. It's such a mishmash of dead grass and empty pots and mud. Oy. I say. One bright spot is the eupatorium havenese (I think that's what it is; definitely some kind of mistflower but tall with white blooms) is covered in buds; some start opening this week.

It's a cool plant when it's blooming but it's really not well situated. It's so sprawly that I think it needs more space to look it's best. Something else to think about moving.


Another plant I need to deal with is the red yucca between the Old Blush rose and the Climbing Pinkie on the steel teepee.(You can see it in the picture behind and to the right of the pots, up against the fence.) It hasn't bloomed in a couple of years (not enough sun?) and I'm tired of it. I need to figure out what to put in there: something tallish but not too sprawling, something that looks good even when it's not blooming, maybe something with some interesting foliage rather than blooms? I put the yucca in there originally to give the whole area some structure instead of just sprawling randomness. Maybe something else along those lines.

Enjoying the breeze

I've been sitting out on the porch, watching the limber branches of the pecan trees to the north of us swirl in the shifting breeze. I got up the energy to water the three roses deeply (okay, I just stuck the end of the hose at the base of each one for twenty minutes or so while I contemplated) but I still haven't figured out what to do with the purple fountain grass or the plumbago that I bought a couple of weeks ago. I did get the manfreda "Macho Mocha" into a pot last week and I'm quite excited that it seems to be developing its characteristics purple spots. I'll post a pic (once it actually does something you can see in a picture and once I get the camera back in action; I was just making some progress figuring out some of its more advanced features and I ran out of battery power).

The salvia "Anthony Parker" is starting to bloom and the salvia guarantica "Black and Blue" in the pot that I chopped back severely a few weeks ago is springing back to life, although there are no signs of any buds yet. The salvia nemarosa under the Old Blush rose has perked back up (it kind of hibernates during the summer) and one of the plants has sent up a bloom stalk. The yellow bells is still blooming wildly and so are the raspberry salvia greggiis the pavonia and the Mexican bush sage, both hamelias, the globe mallow and the zexmenia. The berries on the volunteer chile pequin are turning red.

The Old Blush is also blooming but the blooms are little wimpy things. I have no idea whether its stunted by the heat of last month or whether there's something else I need to do to it. When the camera gets fixed I'll post some pictures and maybe someone will have some ideas. Feed it more often? Water more regularly? The plant itself looks good and its sending up a lot of new growth in this cooler weather but the blooms are still so small.

Now that the upstairs yard is so much the center of my attention everything else has been languishing. I need to think about the downstairs yard and the front bed. And we've been talking about getting rid of a lot of the grass in the front yard (mostly dead anyway) and converting it to some kind of other planting. I'm still afraid of the return of hot weather so maybe I'll give it a few more weeks before I try digging things up and moving them. I'll just sit and contemplate for a bit longer.